Shortly after midnight on 26 April 1986, the name Chernobyl became synonymous with nuclear disaster. A nuclear power station in northern Ukraine exploded after a safety test, casting a radioactive shadow over the land.

A jaguar at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans slipped out of its enclosure and went on a territorial killing rampage sometime overnight, attacking four alpacas, an emu and a fox trapped in their own habitats before zoo officials managed to sedate it.

One of the world's leading plasma research facilities just broke a new record, showing we really are getting closer to the wonderful goal of fusion power - a virtually limitless supply of clean energy.

As researchers around the globe race to create the next element on the periodic table - an atom that contains 119 protons - one scientist from Michigan State University is looking into where the table might end.

Einstein was sure that all objects fall in the same way in a gravitational field, irrespective of their own gravity. It's called the equivalence principle, and scientists just showed it holds firm using a distant triple-star system discovered in 2012

Physicists from E? tv? s University in Budapest and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle have taken an innovative approach to determining when the first organic chemicals formed, and it turns out they could be a lot older than we imagined.

Space agencies and private companies already have advanced plans to send humans to Mars in the next few years – ultimately colonising it. And with a growing number of discoveries of Earth-like planets around nearby stars, long-distance space travel

Visitors to the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) were in for an incredibly rare treat in June, when its resident corpse flower burst into bloom. And for those of us who couldn't get there, the garden staff recorded the event in a spectacular timelaps